Here’s Your Health Excuse to Take a Nap

Conventional wisdom used to be that you can never catch up on a lost night of sleep — but a new study adds weight to the emerging theory that the negative health effects of a sleepless night can actually be reversed by a good nap.

In a small study of 11 healthy men published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), researchers found that even if the men got only two hours of sleep the night before, they could combat the hormonal havoc caused by poor sleep if they took a couple of brief naps.

To reach these results, the researchers had the men undergo two sleep sessions in a lab. In the first, the men only got two hours of sleep and then had their urine and saliva measured and analyzed for hormonal changes. In the second session, the men once again only got two…